Laughter Through Tears

Scarlet Hollow Posting

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:19:09 GMT

Last week, after having heard endlessly about its branching potential and the quality of its art and writing, I played Scarlet Hollow. This is a fairly grisly horror game with shades of southern gothic, cosmic horror, body horror, and psychological horror, among others. Aside from the gorgeous hand-drawn art, it boasts a complex storyline and equally complex characters, with the kind of depth that demands multiple playthroughs and frantic, cross-referential theorizing.

I've been doing most of my Holler-posting on my Tumblr, but I wanted to put together a somewhat longer post that delves into some major spoilers, as well as speculating about some things that I might not yet unlocked. And DW felt like a more natural place to put a post like that.

( Scarlet family tree etc. )

I could probably write a lot more about it, but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

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Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:33:15 GMT

This article about color symbolism in Kpop Demon Hunters is pretty interesting, apropos of nothing.

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Crime.

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 17:36:42 GMT

Been watching a lot of British crime shows and a few American crime shows. Not the big ones, the little guys with eccentric detectives in tiny small-town PDs, so there's some commonality there, despite the differences.

Then, from there, I somehow stumbled onto a show called Grosse Pointe Garden Society, which is technically a crime show, in the sense that crime happens in the show.

If I had to describe this phenomenon, it would be the plot of How to Get Away with Murder, but in the setting of Desperate Housewives, with some possible influences from Only Murders in the Building (a suggestion which may have been planted by how the title was translated). Faint notes of Glee.

For cast, it features the actress who played Michaela on HTGAWM, playing an older version of Michaela with a husband and kids, but she's a realtor; the actress who played Amy on Brooklyn 99, playing Eva Longoria's character from DH, but infinitely more compelling; and two more actors that I don't recognize, playing some kind of tedious hetero love triangle.

There are about four more episodes in the first season that I haven't watched yet. I'm still not sure whose murder they're covering up.

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Humans and Protocols

Sun, 04 May 2025 09:59:17 GMT

I formulated this post originally for the lore channel of the official Palia Discord server. It got a pretty positive response, so I decided to post a backup copy to Dreamwidth.

I know there's been a lot of chatter about the connection between ancient humans, Flow, and the emergence of Majiri people. I haven't read all the threads (so many!), so I probably missed a bunch of important stuff, but it's made me think. Especially in the context of Subira's temple quests, the consoles, and the "protocols" that they mention.

IIRC, two protocols are mentioned: the "Cosmos" protocol (here) and the "Mirror" protocol (which apparently predated it). Mudan personally enacted the Mirror Protocol, as per his letter to his wife (here). We have reason to believe that both protocols were attempts to fight whatever mysterious "shadow(s)" brought about the downfall of Mudan's golden age.

( More lore and speculation )

Alternatively, I could be full of it. That's always a distinct possibility.

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Thoughts on Corval Succession (7KPP)

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 11:43:25 GMT

I've been neglecting the personal accounting I'd intended to post, and today I'm coming to you with a fannish post, instead.

I read a great post on different types of monarchs, which made me think about my sheltered princess Felicity, which in turn led me to think about the succession of the imperial family of Corval.

( Read more... )

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Choice of Rebels - an extremely spoilery analysis/squee

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 07:04:21 GMT

There's a lot I could squee about, but I think by now it's obvious which part of the story I'm most invested in.

So, Breden. Right.

In my mind Breden is a little fixed as a she because I had them as a female character in my first two playthroughs (including Reynard's game, where I both romanced Breden and replayed every chapter but the first three times). As such I'll be referring to Breden as "she" throughout.

( spoilers and speculation )

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Games are difficult (and writing is hard)

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 10:02:46 GMT

So there I was, reading a (really excellent) article analyzing Hanako Games' Magical Diary. This game is a blatant and unapologetic piece of interactive Harry Potter fiction, where the player character goes to a school of magic despite coming from a totally human family. I played it a number of times a few years ago and haven't really touched it since.

Anyway, there I was. It got me thinking about game ideas that I had and discarded, whether at the idea phase or after starting work on them. It also got me thinking about ~problematic romances (a word which has itself, somewhat ironically, become problematic). On the whole I prefer romances that are structured from the get-go to be egalitarian, eye-level and on equal footing. Sometimes, though, something sneaks into my writing that I suspect lurks in the back of my mind, wallowing in the residue of every book, movie and game I've ever consumed.

( Cut because way too long and ultra-specific )

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TV

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 11:39:09 GMT

I watched most of Punisher in a few days and it wasn't half bad, but I think I sort of... forgot... to watch the very last episode.

After seeing Shohreh Aghdashloo in Punisher and being delighted, I discussed it with my brother and he mentioned that she was also playing a major role in The Expanse. Which he'd been encouraging me to start watching for a while now. Since Shohreh Aghdashloo is the actual love of my life, and since I developed a mystery virus that laid me low for a day and a half, I ended up marathoning most of the first season. Fast enough that I had trouble distinguishing between the episodes (thank you, Netflix autoplay). And despite the fact that the first few episodes are so dense and complex I alternated between watching them and reading the (extremely detailed, slightly analytical) episode breakdowns on the fandom wiki.

The Expanse is like Killjoys, except it's wearing a suit and tie instead of jeans and a tube-top. That is, TEX is ostensibly hard sci-fi, and lends huge weight to things like the effects of gravity on bone density (even if it's still trying to convince me that you can wave a magnet at someone and turn them into a sociopath). Meanwhile Killjoys leans pretty hard space opera, at least the way I see it. But the commonalities are more important (to my eye) than the differences: terraforming as a vehicle of social inequality, space miners as a pervasive blue-collar underclass, lots of parallel approaches to social issues.

Not to mention the seemingly sudden introduction of a genre-shifting plot twist, which in retrospect appears highly foreshadowed.

I feel like there's more to dig into here. Not sure I'm well-equipped to do the digging, though, and both shows have been around long enough. I can hope that someone smarter than me has gone and done that analysis already, so that I can simply bask in its glory instead of breaking my head trying to figure out what I'm looking at.

My thoughts are too disorganized for a proper blog post.

Other shows that I am still following: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, The Good Place, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

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Purity

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 17:21:01 GMT

The more I write (and I've been writing for more than fifteen years, half my life or longer), the harder it is to ignore the murkiness of the writing endeavor. I write original fiction and fanfiction, and I also write reviews. The things I look at when I write reviews are sometimes the same as what I examine when I'm writing, but just as often totally different. That can create an absurd type scenario where I criticize a series of books or games for repeating variations on a certain trope, but still be writing that trope into my own original fiction. Not even (necessarily) to subvert it, and on the whole as a media consumer I prefer aversions to self-conscious subversions.

The most obvious case that comes to mind for me right now is a multi-chapter fanfic from years ago that I never finished. This included both a love triangle and an antagonistic, hate-to-love type romance, all wrapped up together. And this was at a time when I had an even stronger aversion to both than I do now. And these were the central threads of the plot, not some supporting B-plot. More recently -- I even wrote a DW post about it -- I was writing a nation of inhuman people as analogues of a real cultural group (my own, but still), which is a thing I've strenuously objected to in the past.

And now there's my Yuri Jam game, if it gets off its feet. When I was coming up with the concept, I was mainly thinking about a cutesy idea of "mad scientists", a kind of character trope that has lost all credibility to the point where it's automatically camp and humorous, in a self-aware way. At least in theory. It's impossible, however, for me to ignore the underlying creepiness of the story, even if I'm trying to tell it from a point of view that places value judgments on the protagonist's choices, and even f the game is built in such a way that it locks the player out of making any truly outrageous character choices. I have to find a way to write around and through it, and address it head-on while still allowing the game to be a little funny.

And I find myself wondering how it is that I keep finding so many corners to paint myself into.

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Name Generators

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 09:51:44 GMT

As a writer, RPer, and all around nerd, I have a whole bunch of name generator websites bookmarked, and am always on the lookout for new and exciting ones. Of course I have also tried my hand at creating some small, primitive generators myself, like this one.

But one of the best qualities of worldbuilding, whether in games or in books, is the ability to simulate greater depth than you actually have. No one can build a world as rich as the real one, and if you tried to do it you would never have time for writing the actual stories taking place in this world. The trick is to make it look like the gaps in your knowledge are full of something that you just happen not to have mentioned. Part of it is investing more work into the things your characters have knowledge and interest in, or rather the reverse: make your characters proficient in something you're interested in developing.

What all that means is that most SFF writers aren't conlangers, and they don't need to be. You can simulate the richness of a unique language to the satisfaction of most, usually just by creating a quick-and-dirty phonology guide, and then staying out of your own way by being careful about idioms, puns and wordplay. The reader's (or player's) imagination provides the rest.

Part of my process is that I find it terribly difficult to write about characters if I haven't named them. This means I'll usually have a string of names before I have any kind of set phonological rules to follow. It also means I find it very hard to change those names, even if they were only meant to be working products. What I would like to be able to do is design a naming tool that you could input a string of names into, and it would break them down into an approximation of individual syllables, and then use those units to construct a series of new names.

I'm pretty sure I have the skills to do this, but it would take time and a fair amount of thought going into designing it, instead of just jumping into tinkering with code like I'm used to.

I'm open to feedback on the technical aspects of this project. I'm also interested in discussing the meta theory behind it, but based on the premise that I laid out. I'm not here for "everything you said is wrong, you're not a real fantasy writer unless you build your own language from scratch". Or anything along those lines. Comment at will, if you cross a line I promise I'll let you know.

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Nonbinary Representations in Fiction

Sat, 06 May 2017 18:24:40 GMT

Nonbinary gendered characters are almost not common enough to have tropes associated with them. Almost, but not quite. The idea of a third gender, bigender, or agender is not actually that recent, after all. It seems to emerge independently, time after time. In modern media, these representations arise just often enough to have a handful of common tropes associated with them. Most of these are tied closely to speculative fiction, where one has the great privilege of learning that one's gender identity is inherently science fictional, alien, unrealistic. Some of them also appear in contemporary setting fictions, although those are less common and even more tied than usual to moral ambiguity.

( Read more... )

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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A Thought About Ghostbusters

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 07:45:29 GMT

My new phone has a lot more space in it than the one that got stolen, so I have been lenient with downloading apps. For example, I downloaded a podcast app that lets me get new episodes wherever there is wireless, without having to remember what day everyone updates. I was wandering around looking for interesting podcasts and happened across Galactic Suburbia and their episode on the new Ghostbusters. I've been listening to it in bits and pieces since it's fairly long and I usually listen to podcasts on the bus.

It got me thinking again about what I did and didn't like about the movie. It also made me want to go look for a supercut of all the times the 2016 movie referenced iconic lines from the original, but that involves going on YouTube and I bet I don't need to explain why I don't want to do that.

( Read more... )

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Notes on a romance novel

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 10:44:48 GMT

I read historical romances once in a blue moon, when I have a craving for three hundred pages of their particular brand of frustration. Earlier in the weekend I picked one up on half a whim and have been tearing through it ever since. With some breaks.

Pro: crossdressing, briefly.

Con: heroine has that obnoxious protagonistic habit of insisting, over and over, that she's not pretty.

( Read more... )

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TV

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 19:22:32 GMT

I watched the whole of Stranger Things over the course of the last few days. My brother has been bugging me to see it. Not that he gave a plot synopsis or anything like that. He's gonna want to know what I think about it and I thought it was pretty meh. The only character I cared about was one, and I cared about them specifically because (without giving any explicit spoilers) the narrative seemed to dismiss their very existence.

How do I explain to my brother that this show was literally made for him?

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The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 08:23:34 GMT

Last night I finished The Cloud Roads, which I had intended to read for I don't know how long. Capped it off by downloading the preview for the second book of the trilogy, The Serpent Sea. I was reminded of it recently -- I had thought it was from a Writing Excuses cast with Martha Wells, but apparently they never had her on and I was confusing an episode about writing inhuman characters with the one where they recced the book. Probably because Ellen Kushner is another fantasy author I probably should have read years ago.

I enjoyed the book tremendously. The protagonist is male, which is usually a thing that would tamp down my interest. Because of the xenofic aspect, though (his species has about five biological sexes), there are aspects of his arcs which are.... Put it this way: you know how some people use slash fic as a way of examining vulnerability in detachment from femininity, to make it less personal? That. I am definitely working on a full review, but I was hoping someone in my circle had read it. Book's been out long enough that someone must have written on the subject, but I think I must be using the wrong search terms.

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Own Your Own (or: Diversity Is Not a Trend)

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 10:57:08 GMT

On Monday evening I returned home from a grueling evening class, intending to "just quickly" check my social media before turning in. Now, normally I am a lot less active on Twitter than I am on Tumblr, but I like to check in and make sure that my account has something on it other than links to my blog posts. It was on this occasion that I discovered the hashtag #OwnYourOwn.

Own Your Own was started by the YA lit blog Interrobang and championed by Kaye M., a Muslim American YA writer and intersectional feminist activist. ( Read more... )

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A Finer-Grained Identity

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 09:37:31 GMT

This week was the one year anniversary of my becoming a full-time writer (in mentality if not in paycheck). Looking back on the good and the bad is sobering. On the one hand, I did not produce as many stories as I would have liked, or expected. My quality of end product is lacking. On the other hand, I can look back on a work of original fiction that I posted a year ago (Hail the Hunter) and think, "wow! that was a long time ago."

I consider that last one to be a pro. ( Read more... )

This subject is emotional to me, so most of the above is probably a meaningless mess of words. I will look back at it late rand be probably horrified. I just need to get it out right now, because it's been gnawing on my mind.

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Tarot as a Tool for Characterization

Sun, 15 May 2016 11:01:23 GMT

A few weeks ago, I posted to Tumblr a link to a game I wrote in Twine. Well, not exactly a game. This Twine story contains images of the Minor Arcana, the lesser-known component of the Tarot deck. The code allows you to select random cards and arrange them in one of three different ways, the better to exploit Tarot's rich history of symbolism as an aid to characterization.

Normally when I use Tarot cards, they serve primarily as a handy go-to source of writing prompts, perfect for little warm-up exercises when I'm having difficulty revving up the writer's engine. ( Read more... )

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Earn It - a Meditation for Person of Interest's Apocalystic Graduation

Sun, 01 May 2016 05:39:54 GMT

This is a story of how Person of Interest worked three long seasons to earn its surveillance dystopia, when other shows of the genre failed to show their work.

This week, Person of Interest returns to the screens for its fifth and final season. After a four season emotional roller-coaster, fans are eager but understandably apprehensive about the conclusion. No one promised us a happy end. In fact, as the show wore on, it became clear that its premise, which initially relied on crime drama with a thin dusting of ambiguous sci-fi, had become radically transformed. Viewers entering the fourth season now knew that the show's world presents a freshly budding dystopia dominated by a conscious and independent artificial intelligence.

( Read more... )

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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Writing Disability: Be Specific, Be Thorough, Do Your Research

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 20:21:22 GMT

Diversity and representation have been climbing up the public agenda of late. When it comes to writing disabled characters, there are a few recurring pitfalls that I’d like to address.

Be Specific

You want to write a disabled character. First, you need to know what their disability is. “In a wheelchair” is not a disability. A wheelchair is a mobility aid, one of several different kinds available to the mobility-impaired. That’s your character, by the way. Did you mean, perhaps, that your character is paraplegic? Paralysis due to traumatic spinal injury is, again, one of many conditions that require or warrant the use of a wheelchair. Are you certain that you want your character to be paraplegic? True, this is the thing that most abled people think about (or avoid thinking about) when conjuring the mental image of a wheelchair. However, it is far from the only reason for someone to use a wheelchair.

( Read more... )

This essay is not an encyclopedia; it’s barely an introduction. I hope, however, that it has given its readers some food for thought, for engaging with their own writing as well as the media they consume.

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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"Oh, Look, It's a Strong Female Protagonist." - a Look at Queen at Arms

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 11:24:18 GMT

Queen at Arms, a strategy and romance visual novel, first became known to me under the working title 'The Silent Princess'. Thankfully this title was dropped pretty quickly since, despite being accurate in the literal sense, it gives an entirely false impression of the game's content. ( Read more... )

Ultimately I would say QAA is a compelling game, although not an excellent one. What recommends it is that it tries to bring something new to the table, and in the experience it can offer to the player. Despite multiple romance paths, achievements and hidden secrets to discover, it has limited replayability value. Recommended with reservations.

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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The Depowering of Barbara Gordon

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 15:13:34 GMT

This is the story of how DC comics depowered Barbara Gordon.

For twenty five years, Barbara Gordon played the role of Oracle, a master-hacker and world-class information broken, leader of the Birds of Prey and a revolving roster of superheroines, and one of the smartest people in the DC universe. This Oracle persona was developed by John Ostrander and Kim Yale after her spine injury in the famous (or notorious) storyline The Killing Joke. This storyline was rightly criticized for treating Batgirl as a prop in a story that focused on the relationship between Batman and the Joker. The Killing Joke is commonly included in lists of “fridgings”, brutal plots visited on female characters, for the purpose of providing motivation for male characters.

( Read more... )

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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Disability in SFF: Not a Link Roundup

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 11:14:43 GMT

Casil has immersed herself fully in a flawed understanding of disability that I tend to think of as the “character balance” fallacy. In a tabletop RPG, character types are generally written to be balanced, so that each player will have a fun and interesting experience. A swordfighter might be better at up-close combat but vulnerable to magical attacks, for example, while a mage might have the ability to shoot long-distance firebolts but be unable to wear much armor. Ideally, characters have equal advantages and disadvantages. Some games even have systems where you can “buy” advantages with disadvantages. Want more points to spend on more impressive spells? Find something that will make your character’s life more difficult, and maybe you can make that work.

Excerpted from Human flaws and disability: NOT the same thing by Tili Sokolov, because it struck me that it was an unusual but apropos perspective. I got there via Jim Hines' No, We’re Not All Disabled, a very even-toned takedown of the original blog post in question. Note that the original post, which Hines quotes extensively, is the kind of ablist bullshit that makes a weird vein pop in my forehead, so. Content note to those who don't need that toxicity in their lives on a Friday afternoon.

Now this just reminds me that I need to write more about "how (not to) write disability" and I've been putting it off.

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Every Hero Needs a Villain (Not a Supergirl Review)

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:45:43 GMT

Poor Supergirl. She never can seem to settle on a proper supporting cast of her very own. Sure, all comics superheroes go through endless permutations -- power changes, costume changes, forgettable one-off villains -- but always there is some sort of baseline to come back to. Always there is at least a mentor, or best friend, or love interest that recurs in every incarnation. And always, always a nemesis. A hero that doesn't manage to establish a proper rogues gallery is bound to falter.

( Read more... )

The core idea behind the TV show, aside from Supergirl's ongoing efforts to achieve an independent reputation, seems to be that Kara, unlike Clark, actually remembers Krypton. This, I think, is a good start. How it progresses remains to be seen.

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How to Get Away with Characters Making Terrible Decisions

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 10:15:12 GMT

The best thing about How to Get Away with Murder is Viola Davis.(1) The second best thing about HTGAWM is that it is a show about smart people making stupid decisions. I might have mentioned this is one of my favorite characterization themes. Annalise is brilliant from the start, shown to be both creative and ruthless in her problem solving abilities. She habitually takes the most difficult cases and prides herself on being able to turn around desperate situations.

( Read more... )

(1) I may have teared up just a little when I found out she would be playing the incomparable Amanda Waller for DC's Suicide Squad movie.

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

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